>>1773392There’s a pretty bad housing crisis for one, making prices insanely high to buy and rent there and pricing a lot of people out. The government is resistant to simply building to meet demand because adding a couple hundred thousand new homes would mean a couple hundred thousand new people, which would require more delivery trucks that are damaging the centuries-old infrastructure designed for horse carts. Adding that many people would also increase congestion, the Netherlands already has the worst traffic and some of the longest commute times (factoring in public transit) in the EU and Amsterdam is particularly awful despite the amount of people riding bikes. It’s nearly impossible to own a car in the central city due to extremely high costs and impossible parking so older people tend to move out of there to the suburbs when it’s time to start a family and they need more space and might want a car to do things on the weekend with.
Essentially, the quirks of Amsterdam like easy cycling and great transit make it an awesome place to live for a couple years, but some of the downsides like horrible congestion, sky high housing prices, inability to own a car, and the disrespect that tourists and transient residents show your front yard make it an unappealing place to live long-term, once you have kids and such. I think this is particularly bad for US cities to emulate, because US cities have no problem attracting young people to live there for a bit. The problem
Is that those young people eventually leave. US cities need to find ways to be attractive to older people with kids and such to keep them from moving to the suburbs, and frankly that way to do that isn’t by trying to copy the bachelor party capitol of the world.
